What's keeping all those people from having to liquidate the games out of credit card debt anyway? In these times surely money will dry up somehow.
I'm pretty sure they are doing just that, over and over again. The shit just moves from one guy to the next.
This brings up an interesting idea. Wouldn't it be fun to purposefully f*ck up a game's eBay value. It would be easy to drive the price up, but driving it down would take some cleverness, and some money, of course.
Possible method: Everyone here puts their personal copies of some game like Deep Blue on eBay with $250 BINs and just leave them there forever. If we could get 100 of them on there...that would be f*cking hilarious, and certainly drive up the price. Then we could all dump them at $1 a year later, one after another in a short span of time, and kill the fake price.
Candidate game: it has to be something less common than TV Sports of Keith Courage, but still common, and something not commonly thought to be valuable. Deep Blue maybe, or Yo Bro.
I thought about doing something like this while typing my last post. But the thought of it backfiring was too scary. I thought up of something I can do alone to put a dent in some of the gouging. I will cost me some money, but I think I'm going to do it. In order for it to be effective, I can't say what it is until after it is successful.
I don't want to ruin your plan, but here is what I considered a long time ago (when I used eBay):
(1) Most folks use eBay to sell crap. Yet...
(2) eBay, as a historical record, becomes a source of: information,
misinformation and
disinformation.
(3) We, as dissidents, can try to use eBay as the battle ground for an information war. Our weapons, truth and reason, aimed at all the price gouging, misinformation and disinformation.
(4) We would have to be very active and creative in this information war. I don't pretend to have any answers, and I don't know what we would do if eBay blocked/closed our accounts.
(5) Random ideas I've had (all violate eBay's TOS, I'm sure, and are thwarted with other flaws as well. Read for entertainment value!):
(a)
CO-OPT eBay for educational purposes. We create bogus auctions, simply to provide information on price gouging. We basically CLONE the offending auction, but we offer INFORMATION and ADVICE in our listing. We are providing targeted PSA's (public service announcements) to all the buyers interested in a particular title. METHOD: VERY LOW starting bid, to attract attention/but $800,000+ reserve price so we can cancel listing without complications.
(b)
Create a "SNOPES.COM" of ebay price gouging. That is, (1) we create and host an accessible, easy-to-digest primer on price gouging. VERY GENERAL GUIDE. Then, perhaps as a wiki, we have (2) TITLE-SPECIFIC entries with detailed information to counter the ridiculous claims sellers spew out. Most of this valuable information exists already, petrifying in specialized forums, but it needs to be consolidated.
(c)
GUERILLA WARFARE. This one is least feasible, could be considered malicious, but is most awesome. We go (systematically, as a large group of bidders) to all price gouging auctions and bid them up to ridiculous ($100,000+) amounts, and not pay. I suppose this is really just a daydream. MINOR PROBLEM: There is no way to create an endless supply of new eBay accounts to replace all our accounts that would be banned.
(d)
GIVE UP & BUY FROM FORUM "FRIENDS". This is my current M.O.
